THE POLITICAL VERSUS THE BIOLOGICAL who are part Asian and part black, or part American Indian and part Asian, with these letters saying, 'I don't want to check just one box. I don't want to deny part of my heritage.' It's very compelling." This year, Katzen convened a new interagency committee to consider how races should be categorized, and even whether racial information should be sought at all. "To me it's offensiv because I think of the Holocaust- for someone to say what a Jew is," says Katzen. "I don't think a govern- ment agency should be definIng racial and ethnic categories-that certainly was not what was ever intended by these standards." I s it any accident that racial and eth- nic categories should come under attack now, when being a member of a minority group brings certain ad- vantages? The white colonizers of North America conquered the indigenous people, imported Mrican slaves, brought in Asians as laborers and then excluded them with prejudicial immigration laws, and appropriated Mexican land and the people who were living on it. In short, the nonwhite population of America has historically been subju- gated and treated as second -class citizens by the white majority. It is to redress the social and economic inequalities of our history that we have civil-rights laws and affirmative-action plans in the first place Advocates of various racial and ethnic groups point out that many of the people now calling for a race-blind society are political conservatives, who may have an interest in undermining the advancement of nonwhites in our society. Suddenly, the conservatives have adopted the language of integra- tion, it seems, and the left-leaning racial-identity advocates have adopted the language of separatism. It amounts to a polar reversal of political rhetoric. Jon Michael Spencer, a professor in the Mrican and Mro-American Stud- ies Curriculum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently wrote an article in The Black Scholar la- menting what he calls "the postmodern conspIracy to explode racial identity." The article ignited a passionate debate in the magazine over the nature and the future of race. Spencer believes that race is a useful metaphor for cultural and historic difference, because it permits a level of social cohesion among op- pressed classes. "To relinquish the no- tion of race-even though it's a cruel hoax-at this particular time is to relin- quish our fortress against the powers and principalities that still try to under- mine us," he says. He sees the Multi- racial box as politically damaging to "those who need to galvanize peoples around the racial idea of black." There are some black cultural na- tIonalists who might welcome the Multiracial category. "In terms of the Mrican-American population, it could be very, very useful, because there is a need to clarifY who is in and who is not," Molefi Kete Asante, who is the chair- person of the Department of Mrican- American StudIes at Temple Univer- sity, says. "In fact, I would think they should go further than that-identify those people who are in interracial . " marrIages. Spencer, however, thinks that it might be better to eliminate racial cat- egories altogether than to create an ad- ditional category that empties the oth- ers of meaning. "If you had who knows how many thousands or tens of thou- sands or millions of people claiming to be multiracial, you would lessen the number who are black," Spencer says. "There's no end in sight. There's no limit to which one can go in claiming to be multiracial. For instance, I happen to be very brown in complexion, but when I go to the continent of Mrica, blacks and whites there claim that I would be 'colored' rather than black, 55 which means that somewhere in my distant past-probably during the era of slavery-I could have one or more white ancestors. So does that mean that I, too, could check Multiracial? Certainly light-skinned black peo- ple might perhaps see this as a way out of being included among a despised racIal group. The result could be the creation of another class of people, who are betwixt and between black and white." Whatever comes out of this discus- sion, the nation is likely to engage in the most profound debate of racial questions in decades. "We recognize the importance of racial categories in correcting clear injustices under the law," Representative Sawyer says. "The dilemma we face is trying to assure the fundamental guarantees of equality of opportunity while at the same time recognizing that the populations them- selves are changing as we seek to cat- egorize them. It reaches the point where it becomes an absurd counting game. Part of the difficulty is that we are dealing with the illusion of preci- sion. We wind up with precise counts of everybody in the country, and they are precisely wrong. They don't re- flect who we are as a people. To be effective, the concepts of individual and group identity need to reflect not only who we have been but who we are becoming. The more these categories distort our perception of reality, the less useful they are. We act as if we knew what we're talking about when we talk about race, and we don't" . Ð . . -::' a' · , · r I .... .. · ''Pardon my glove. "